V

It was summer again. The school was closed. Keith's pleas to be allowed
to play with Johan became impassioned. Consequently his parents were
pleased when Aunt Brita asked if Keith could spend a few weeks with
them in a little cottage they had hired on an island halfway between
Stockholm and the open sea.

To Keith this was a tremendous adventure--his first excursion from home,
and almost his first acquaintance with real country life. In fact, the
impressions of the journey itself were so many and so novel that his
mind couldn't retain anything at all. The same thing happened over and
over again during the earlier part of his life, so that out of that
epoch-making summer visit, for instance, only a single slight incident
took up a lasting abode in his memory.

The cottage stood in the middle of the island, which was so small that a
fifteen-minute walk took them down to the nearest shore. Thither they
went one afternoon not long after his arrival to bathe--his aunt, his
cousin Carl who was a year younger than himself, Keith, a couple of
other children of the same age, and Mina, an eighteen-year old girl
living with Keith's uncle and aunt in a position halfway between ward
and servant. Across the fields and along shaded wood paths they ran
joyously to a sheltered bay with a sandy beach from which the open fjord
could be seen in the distance. The children stripped helter-skelter and
went into the shallow water as nature had made them, but Mina, who was
to assist them, had for want of bathing suit put on a starched white
petticoat. The upper part of her body was bare, showing two beautifully
pointed breasts.